


Bond Girls

by greywash



Category: due South
Genre: Alcohol, Female Friendship, Gen, Gun Violence, Guns, Institutional creepiness, Institutional sexism, Original Character(s), Spies, Violence, Women Being Awesome
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-22
Updated: 2012-12-22
Packaged: 2017-11-22 00:53:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,738
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/604020
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/greywash/pseuds/greywash
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <em>Inspector Thatcher transferred to the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, where she was instrumental in the destabilization and overthrow of several world dictators.</em>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>— "Call of the Wild, Part II"</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bond Girls

**Author's Note:**

  * For [TanyaReed](https://archiveofourown.org/users/TanyaReed/gifts).



> For **TanyaReed** : Happy Holidays, and I hope that this does something to fulfill your yen for women being awesome!!
> 
> Many thanks to **[redacted]** and **[redacted]** for beta, audiencing, and, ah, extensive author steering services.

It's an eight hour flight from Ottawa to Munich, another seven and a half hours on a train after that; her contact—"Please, call me Ana," with the sort of low, geographically indeterminate and syrup-slow accent that, in Meg's experience, makes men expect scantily-clad Bond girls and miss their very discreet knives until the tips are tucked cozily in alongside their ribs; it's almost certainly fake—meets her in a gracelessly aging Škoda 130 and chainsmokes for the entire six-hour drive. At first, Meg doesn't know what to make of her. She asks Ana to put out the cigarette, then rolls down the window when this request has absolutely no effect. After one hour, Meg gives up and rolls the window back up—it's freezing—and after another two, she gives up the rest of the way and asks for a light. Ana gives her a look of well-cultivated contempt, but passes her the pack—Ana's third—and the lighter. It's snowing hard when they ditch the car at the border, harder still when the ride they've hitched ditches them at two in the morning.

"I hate jobs like this," Ana says, shivering, huddled deep into her puffy pink coat with her duffel bag slung over her shoulder while Meg hot-wires them a Dacia Nova. It's taking a while—she's out of practice—but Meg likes the car. It's red. It's kicky. "I hate being cold," Ana grumbles.

It shouldn't really be a new piece of information; Ana's a small woman with big snow boots and an absurd pair of fuzzy green mittens. Meg can't believe they let anyone into international work who owns a pair of mittens like that. But Meg wasn't a diplomat for nothing; "Booze helps," she says, repressing a well-deserved but probably impolitic critique of the mittens, then grunts as the engine sputters to life. Ana cheers and stomps over to the passenger seat.

"Vodka," Ana says, pushing enough faux Eastern Europe into the V to split it into a W. "When we stop, I buy you vodka—" she drops the accent and gives Meg's arm a mitteny pat— "but for now, you drive."

Meg is surprised, for some reason; she laughs, and drives.

 

Meg spends three weeks behind a desk with old men trying to leer down her top all day while exercising her languishing and atrophied linguistic muscles and taking pictures of every document that crosses her desk with a digital camera the size of a matchbox—handy little thing—that she keeps tucked uncomfortably in her bra. In the evening she reports back to Ana's smoke-choked hotel room—filthy habit, really—one floor up from Meg's own, where Ana sits in among a monstrous nest of scavenged computer equipment in a pink thermal top and alternating printed flannel pajama bottoms (birds on one pair; the Little Prince on the other), with her fine, fair hair frizzing out of a sloppy ponytail and a bedraggled cigarette clenched between her fingers.

"You know," Meg says, kicking off her pumps, "I thought I was _leaving_ my desk job," and Ana laughs.

"Fun and excitement in the secret services!" she says. She sounds like a Valley girl and flicks ash all over the room when she throws her arms up ecstatically, her face a comically exaggerated mask of glee. She sighs and drops her hands. "It is important work, you know. We do important work. It can't all be martinis and shootouts."

"Evidence," Meg agrees.

"Law and order," Ana adds.

"Truth and justice," Meg agrees. "Pass me the vodka."

Ana passes her the vodka.

 

On the Tuesday of the fourth week, Ana is crouched behind her wall of computer equipment—desperately clacking on three keyboards at once, from the sound of it—while Meg piles every piece of furniture against the room against the door in between carefully aimed and timed shots out the window with a Walther P99. It's useless; handguns aren't designed for this crap.

"Hurry up, please!" Meg grits out, and fires, then ducks back down to block their line of sight.

"I am typing as fast as I can!" Ana snaps. "I'd like to see you hack three governmental systems with no warning in fifteen minutes because your partner accidentally called a general a sleazy pig; _what were you thinking_?"

"I was thinking he was a sleazy pig!" Meg flinches as the next volley rips a drunken line of holes through the hotel's faded floral wallpaper. "Ana, I'm almost out—please! As fast as you can!"

" _Out_?" Ana cries. "Oh, for f—there's a AR-15 in the bathtub!"

"Why didn't you tell me earlier?!" Meg yells, and dashes for the bathroom. She yanks the curtain back. There is, in fact, an AR-15 in the bathtub. She grabs it and dashes back towards the window. "And why do you have an AR-15 in the bathtub?!"

"It's useful! I'm a spy!" Ana shouts back, typing furiously. "And I have a complex about people sneaking up on me on the toilet! And it's _my_ rifle; why don't you have a rifle? You should have a rifle! You cannot always get your way with tiny guns!"

"So you keep a _rifle_ in your _bathtub_?" Meg crouches down and aims.

"I do take it out when I have a wash! If I put it on top of the toilet I can still reach it; it makes me feel better!" The return fire passes straight through the window and hits the light fixture, showering glass all over the room. Ana screams, "Kill them _faster_!"

"Trying!" Meg snaps, and takes out two snipers and a man with a grenade launcher and an expensive suit.

Ana makes more frustrated noises and mumbles to herself in French—Korean—Farsi—and then says, "A-ha! Okay! Done, done! We can go!" She shoves something clanky into her duffel bag and scrambles towards the bathroom on her hands and knees.

"What, do you have to _pee_?" Meg yells.

"No—but there's a hatch into the crawl space; we can get out this way!" Ana's voice is muffled. "Hurry!"

Meg hurries. Ten minutes later they tumble out into the snow at the back of the hotel and Ana carjacks a cab driver and then drives like a crazy person all the way out of town. Ana is still wearing her bunny slippers. Meg has glass in her hair and feels like laughing.

 

It's another four days before they finally make it to Paris, and another two hours before they locate a hotel that doesn't take one look at them and become suddenly and unexpectedly fully booked. The room they end up in is ugly and has two hard twin beds but there's a private bathroom and the beds are flat and not moving and beyond that Meg doesn't care.

" _Bath_ ," Ana says happily.

"The rifle should stay near the beds," Meg tells her, "but you can have my gun for the bathroom if you want it."

"Oh, fine," Ana says, and takes the proffered Walther P99. Ana goes and takes her bath, and then Meg has hers, and then they get dressed like normal people and head out into the city for dinner and wine. Lots and lots and lots of wine. Ana tells the waiter they're exchange students and what should they see while they're here? and Meg widens her eyes and helps exhort a promise that he and his roommate, whose name is apparently Jean-Paul, will show them the city the next day.

"He's—what do you think, twenty? Twenty-five?" Ana asks, a little sleepily back up in the room. She's sitting on her bed, reassembling her Frankenputer from the weird collection of bits in her bag.

"I don't care; we got shot at," Meg says. "If that doesn't earn us twenty-year-old waiters I don't know what does. Are you really going to work tonight? I'm so drunk I feel like I have four noses."

Ana tugs the cord out of the phone and plugs it into a sleek black modem. Her bag is like Mary Poppins's bag; there's no possible way all that crap and a rifle could fit in there, but it does. "I'm going to check my email," Ana corrects. "I sent my dad a hat for his birthday; I want to know if he got it."

Meg laughs. "And where's Dad?" she asks, looking over.

"Costa Rica," Ana says. "He likes the beach."

"Me, too," Meg says. "I wonder what we have to do to be assigned a job near the beach."

Ana hums. "If you figure it out, let me know," she says. "I signed up for classy soirees with men in tuxes and I got freezing my ass off while sorting through politicians' boring emails or baking in un-air conditioned hotel rooms and listening to high-quality audio footage of military brass snoring at their desks after lunch. And shoot-outs always seem more fun after the fact."

"I think shoot-outs are fun," Meg protests.

"You're weird," Ana tells her, pleased.

"You keep a rifle in the bathtub," Meg reminds her.

"No, now it's by the nightstand," Ana corrects.

Megs waves a hand at the ceiling, admitting defeat. "Mostly I signed up for the opportunity to say, _Bond, James Bond_ ," she admits, in her best Scottish accent. "Or, well—Thatcher, Meg Thatcher." She smacks her lips together. "Thatcher, Meg Thatcher. See?"

"Grygo, Ana Grygo," Ana tries. "Hm! That _is_ nice."

"Oh, well," Meg says. "Next time we go out to try and take down a foreign government, I'll try to see if I can arrange for it to be one near the beach, and you can try to arrange for us to have an opportunity to introduce ourselves properly." She closes her eyes and stretches her arms out above her head.

"Next time," Ana agrees. The other bed creaks under her weight.

Meg feels—she feels good. She's drunk off her face and she still feels _sharp_ , like a knife that is in frequent and judicious use. She liked being an officer, and she liked—she liked _bits_ of diplomatic work, the bits where she was useful. It's just that a lot of the time, those bits were awfully hard to find. She's felt useful, lately.

"Hey." Ana is rolling over, her bed squeaking. "Thatcher, Meg Thatcher."

Meg replies, "Grygo, Ana Grygo," sleepy and slow.

"Tomorrow," Ana mumbles. "We practice on Jean-Paul."

Meg smiles without opening her eyes.


End file.
